We cannot have civil politics if discourse uses scare tactics

March 21, 2012|Tony Plakas

My earliest memory of church is not a fond one. Maybe it was the bleeding man hanging from a cross wearing a crown of thorns, or the bearded man wearing black, spewing smoke and speaking a foreign language that set me off - but something in my Orthodox church scared me to screams.

It was my second Mass, and the one where I acquainted hundreds of strangers with one of the first Greek words my father ever taught me: Baboola. I shouted "baboola" at the top of my little lungs, until my parents left midnight services before taking communion.

I really had no idea what a "baboola" was, or why my father spoke the name with big, wide-eyes - and in a hushed tone - but my parents learned a lesson that night: Suggesting a monster might eat me if I didn't obey commands to sleep, eat or do as told had consequences.

Scaring impressionable people, young or old, with stories about a boogeyman is risky. Yet the voiceover of a campaign attack ad proves the boogeyman's voice is omnipresent and easily recognizable to us all.

I never warmed to church, but as an adolescent from rural Pennsylvania I left high school with harsh views. I was absolutely anti-gay and unapologetically pro-life.

I remember wondering why an all-powerful God would permit unfit mothers to become pregnant, and I was so pro-life I dedicated myself to science, moving on to college to study biology.

The values I held then did not come from church teachings. Church lost me when I learned Christmas had nothing to do with Santa and Easter nothing to do with a bunny or painted eggs.

My values before college derived from simple observations of my surroundings, crude deductions made from interpretations of my world view, and the fact few people challenged my ideals.

Only one student in my school was black, and we were often reminded that white parents adopted him.

The only men known to be gay were said to prey on children, so I deduced they were a threat to society.

And if a woman didn't respect the miracle of conception, she simply had little respect for life.

In the aftermath of the Susan G. Komen Foundation's very public abortion, I hoped we'd be challenged to have broader conversations about the consequences of babloola scare tactics.

Intimate, complicated, nuanced ideas don't simply evolve, they modify when we learn to challenge ourselves and interact with people who do not always align with core beliefs we've always accepted as truth.

Yet, some are so determined to change our minds they'll drive life through a woman's breasts to get to our hearts.

Instead of delving deeper into conversations about the intimate and private experience of having a sexual orientation or gender identity variant to others - and how specific ideals of masculinity and femininity make it hard to find love - some choose to devolve into pithy sound bites and ignorant displays of stubbornness to evoke the worst fears of people discomforted by multiplicity. Is that really the American way?

This weekend I am going to march down Main Street, with generations of people who found a way to maintain pride in an environment aimed at making them the boogeyman of someone else's belief system.

I do this because I believe future generations think those I march with were the heroes of their time - because today's youth see more clearly the babloola's of our past are nothing more than the bullies of our present - people so afraid to be confronted about the beliefs to which they cling they would create a country intolerant of anything that challenges their own image of morality and perfection.

I don't profess to know what is right, but I know what is irrational - and irrational is the business of baboolas - people who frighten others into their own idea of perfection by scaring us into being what others expect us to be.

Tony Plakas is the CEO of Compass, the gay and lesbian community center of Lake Worth and the Palm Beaches.